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Why Do Boomers Love Baseball?

Fans of a certain age at opening day in Milwaukee as the Brewers took on the Colorado Rockies. (The home team won.)Credit
Darren Hauck/Reuters

When you think about, is one stretch really enough? And why must we wait until the seventh inning? These aging bones and muscles could use a break — to say nothing about these bladders.

Baseball is back, and for many people, life feels right again. It may no longer be convincing when baseball casts itself as America's pastime (football surpassed it decades ago, surveys show), but the game is still plenty popular, and especially among certain people. Those people, says Talmage Boston, a Texas lawyer who writes about the sport, were born between the World Series highlight moments of Enos Slaughter and Bob Gibson. Which is just another way of saying 1946 and 1964. That’s right: baby boomers.

Everybody likes a good Old-Timers’ Day, but Major League Baseball has a business to run, and it wants to make certain no one mistakes the retired players for the fans. The game, M.L.B. says, is followed by people of all ages. “The percentage of baseball fans in the various age categories closely mirrors the American population,” a spokesman said.

Still, younger fans seem more drawn to other sports, said a recent report by the ConvergEx Group, a trading and investment company that uses baseball attendance as an economic indicator. “So who exactly is the M.L.B. fan base?” the report said. “It’s primarily middle- to upper-middle class baby boomers.”

In a Sports of the Times column some years back, Selena Roberts made a similar observation, if somewhat more dismissively. “Certainly baseball’s fat attendance is bursting with baby boomers,” she wrote. “But the sport is an old flame for romantic types.”

What is it about baseball and boomers?

“Baseball just has a deliberate speed to it, and the older you get, the more I think you like it,” Mr. Boston said.

Rich Luker, the founder of the ESPN Sports Poll, made a similar point. “Why golf, Nascar and baseball?” he said in an e-mail. “Among other things, no clock. Seriously. One thing that does not seem to be changing with boomers as they age is the desire to turn down the intensity a notch. We (I am among them) don’t want to rush anywhere anymore.”

As it happens, Mr. Luker said, an older audience is not a problem for baseball. The sport will profit from the growing number of Americans over 50, many with money to spend, whose interest in sports keeps getting stronger, he said.

He also said that while Americans under 35 seem less interested in sports (not just baseball) than they were 10 years ago, there are signs that is changing for baseball. M.L.B. said its attendance at regular-season games last year was the fifth-highest on record.

Even Beth Reed, the ConvergEx vice president who wrote the baseball report, sounded positive about the sport’s future. “Baseball’s never going to go away,” she said. “It’ll be around forever.”

Not that she sounded too excited about that. Ms. Reed prefers basketball and football. “Baseball’s just so slow, and there’s so many games,” she said, “that it’s not as exciting as some of the other sports.”